They quietly take it all in — everything that happens under their outstretched branches. They are non-judgmental, neither rebuking nor lecturing.

So much has happened on their watch. I wish they could tell me the things they have seen.

So here I am at sunrise on a recent Sunday morning, camera in hand, circling among the bleached tombstones at Woodward Hill Cemetery, trying to capture a fitting last image of a 100-foot-high English elm.

The tree, largest of its kind in Pennsylvania, fittingly stands sentry on one of the highest points in the city.

It is the last living link to our proud city’s Colonial days.

Or was. After ever so slowly unfolding for perhaps 283 years, the tree contracted the dreaded Dutch elm disease and suddenly dropped its leaves in a death throe this summer.

“Gosh, it’s been here a long time,” says Ben Tresselt III, an arborist who voluntarily has taken care of the tree since 2000 and whose crew will dismantle it sometime this winter.

“It’s seen a lot going on. It will be a sad day.”

Though English elms can live up to 400 years or so, the Woodward Hill elm had dodged the relentless onslaught of the elm bark beetle longer than most of its ilk.

Several English elms of similar vintage succumbed to the disease at St. James Episcopal Church on East Orange Street in 1993.

It was just a matter of time.

“Trees are living organisms just like we are, and part of their cycle is death, just like us,” Tresselt tells me.

So I guess I am paying my last respects.

As the tree begins to glow in the soft morning light and I snap away, I am startled by a man gliding silently past the headstones.

“I’m going to miss that tree,” says Luther Harnish, who lives nearby on South Queen Street.

Harnish, 85, walks through the sprawling cemetery up to seven days a week for exercise and contemplation.

He remembers the tree while playing in the cemetery as a kid in the 1920s.

“Back then, if the caretaker got hold of you, you got your rear end kicked,” he says. chuckling.

Harnish refers to the elm as “she” and says the tree had been going downhill ever since a storm ripped a big limb off a couple of years ago.

“She’s quite a tree. It’s a darn shame,” he says.

The tree, which sits several hundred feet north of Chesapeake Street, probably was transported across the Atlantic Ocean and planted as a sapling by English settlers, just six years after Lancaster was settled in 1718.

It was already an impressive specimen, experts say, when Woodward Hill began in the 1850s.

There are some who dispute the tree’s age. A letter writer to the New Era predicts it will be found to be 100 to 125 years younger than claimed.

We will know soon enough when it is cut down and the growth rings are counted.

It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll just miss that tree up on the hill. In a world with few constants, it has always been there, like a wise, old friend.

CONTACT US: acrable@LNPnews.com or 481-6029. The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.